John Ridley's Niggers

The ideas in John Ridley's Esquire article were certainly provocative but they were not fresh. For decades, upper class
and middle class African Americans have been highlighting the pathologies of the black
underclass as a way to both distance themselves from such behavior, and to blame poor
blacks for their poverty. These "successful" African Americans accept the false dichotomy
between "good blacks" and "Niggers." Nigger, for them, is a class-based slur, a way of saying, "You are not my brother, you are
less than I am. You are contemptible, raggedy, and ghetto, a victim of your own immorality
and ineptitude -- blaming whites for what ails you. I am not one of you; I am better
than you. You don't educate your children or pay your bills; you don't have a job,
you are ill-bred, and you are a walking crime spree. You are a nightmare. You give
decent black people a bad name. Look at me: I read, speak in a monotone, make a steady
paycheck, talk intelligently, and act civilly. I have dreams. Bill Cosby was right
about you. I'm tired of your poor, ignorant, thuggish ass." Ridley placed those ideas
in a national magazine.

In 1996 Chris Rock, an African American comedian, hosted a Home Box Office (HBO) special,
Bring The Pain (Rock & Truesdell). Rock drew huge laughs from the mostly black audience with his
rant about the difference between black people and Niggers. Rock said: "Who's more
racist: black people or white people? Black people. You know why? Because we hate
black people too. Everything that white people don't like about black people, black
people really don't like about black people. It's some sh*t going on with black people. "It's like
a civil war going on with black people. And there's two sides: there's black people,
and there's niggers. And niggers have got to go." Rock may have been joking, but Ridley was not.

Ridley's essay validates a claim that I have made before many audiences, namely, the
problem with the word nigger is not simply that blacks routinely use it but rather that many African Americans
believe that niggers really exist. The question, "How do we stop Americans from treating us as niggers?" is replaced
by "How do I keep from becoming a nigger?" Here I put words into Ridley's mouth, "The best thing
black people can do for niggers is not to become one."

If you are convinced that some people within your community are indeed niggers, then
questions arise, the first being, how do you know one when you see one? Recently,
I facilitated a workshop in Virginia where almost all the participants were African
Americans with advanced university degrees. We were discussing a shirt that I brought
from the Jim Crow Museum that had young black men depicted in stereotypical ways:
pants sagging, carrying music boxes, looking threatening -- and one fellow urinating
on the street. When I asked the workshop participants to tell me what they saw, several
said, "Niggers." For the next hour we discussed what that word meant to them. I can
summarize their beliefs this way: niggers are real; they can be men or women, but
the scary ones are usually young men -- the women mostly hurt themselves with unwanted
pregnancies; most niggers are poor, lazy, and ignorant; niggers are no-good, trifling
victims who constantly complain; Washington, D.C. is full of them; and, finally, none
of the participants in the room were niggers (though one person quipped with unintentional
irony that I had obvious sympathies). Their depictions of so-called niggers sound
like the portrayal that was offered by Ridley (2006) in the first paragraph of his
essay:

"LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT NIGGERS, the oppressed minority within our minority. Always down. Always out. Always complaining that they can't catch a
break. Notoriously poor about doing for themselves. Constantly in need of a leader
but unable to follow in any direction that's navigated by hard work, self-reliance.
And though they spliff and drink and procreate their way onto welfare doles and WIC
lines, niggers will tell you their state of being is no fault of their own. They are
not responsible for their nearly 5 percent incarceration rate and their 9.2 percent
unemployment rate. Not responsible for the 11.8 percent rate at which they drop out
of high school. For the 69.3 percent of births they create out of wedlock."

It is a struggle for me but I try to be objective when I facilitate workshops; however,
near the conclusion of the session I felt compelled to preach:

"Who told you that some of us are niggers? Were the four little girls bombed in a
Birmingham church, niggers? Were they? Were the brothers and sisters who suffered
in the civil rights movement niggers? Do you remember them -- beaten with batons,
kicked, bitten by police dogs, stomped, knocked against walls by power hoses, jailed,
kidnapped, raped, thrown in rivers, eulogized before crying neighbors. Was Rosa Parks
a nigger? No, then neither is the young sister with the baby on her hip."

And when I finished someone asked if I had ever lived in a large city and when I answered
no, the looks on their faces said, "Ah, then you don't really know what you are talking
about."

Who is Ridley calling a nigger? For much of his essay his scorn appears to be directed
toward the "black underclass," however, he gives statistics that are reflective of
the entire black American population. For example, he says that niggers are responsible
for their 9.2 percent unemployment rate, but that rate looks a lot like the rate of
unemployment for all blacks. The recession of 2001 raised the unemployment rate for
whites from the 3.5 percent figure of 2000 to 5.2 percent by 2003. During that same
period the unemployment rate for African Americans jumped to 10.8 percent. Was Ridley
suggesting that all unemployed blacks are niggers? What about unemployed whites? In
2007, the unemployment rate for blacks was 8.3 percent. That figure exceeded the pre-recession
low and was more than twice the unemployment rate for whites. Goldman Sachs estimated
that a new recession (and one is coming, if not already here) would increase the national
unemployment rate to 6.4 percent by 2009 ("U.S. Economics", 2008). For blacks, they
estimate that the unemployment rate would rise to 11 percent (Austin, 2008). Again,
when Ridley used national unemployment data for all blacks (and not data specific
to the black underclass) he implies that any black person who is unemployed is a lazy
nigger.

"Predictably, niggers immediately abandoned him. How could any self-respecting black
man want to run from the Liberal Plantation? Never mind that he was a self-made modern
American hero who openly espoused the value of affirmative action. Old-schoolers tagged
Powell with the usual left-wing racist jabber. Powell was a sellout. A Tom. In a particularly
ugly rant, Harry Belafonte infamously alluded to Powell as being a house nigger."

So, Ridley says that African American critics of Rice and Powell are niggers. Does
nigger mean liberal? Calling liberal blacks niggers is the flip side of calling conservative blacks Toms. Julian Bond and Harry Belafonte are not the imagined niggers that Ridley derides
in the beginning and conclusion of his essay -- but they are thinkers and activists
whose policy recommendations offend Ridley, so even though they are hard-working and
accomplished they become niggers by association, "courtesy niggers," if you will.

Ridley's essay begs another question, "If there are real niggers what should happen
to them?" Ridley talks about "the deal forced upon the entrenched white social, political,
and legal establishment when my parents' generation won the struggle for civil rights.
The Deal: We (blacks) take what is rightfully ours and you (the afore-described establishment)
get citizens who will invest the same energy and dedication into raising families
and working hard and being all around good people as was invested in snapping the
neck of Jim Crow." In other words, if you stop discriminating against us we will stop
being niggers. We will assimilate: walk like, talk like, vote like the dominant group
-- flatter whites with our imitation of their lives. Ridley claims that poor blacks
and their liberal enablers have reneged on the Deal, and their punishment should be
swift, certain, and harsh: successful blacks should abandon so-called niggers, treat
them like outcasts. In Ridley's words,

"It's time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck. Just as whites may be concerned
with the good of all citizens but don't travel their days worrying specifically about
the well-being of hillbillies from Appalachia, we need to send niggers on their way.
We need to start extolling the most virtuous of ourselves."

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel
in Memphis, Tennessee. He was not in Memphis representing "ascended blacks," no, he
was working on behalf of garbage workers, most of them black, who complained that
they worked too hard, for too little money, in unsafe conditions. Ridley's approach
to the poor is different. Dr. King cared deeply for the poor and his compassion grew
out of his religious convictions. He did not employ shunning as a way to influence,
encourage, or coerce normative behaviors. He did not exalt the "most virtuous of ourselves"
to embarrass and shame the "worst of us." He did not treat black people, any black
people, as niggers. Ridley has the right to call for shunning -- avoidance, Meidung,
or as he puts it, "send niggers on their way" -- but he does not have the right to
link his ideas to Dr. King and the civil rights movement and expect to not be challenged.

I have criticized often and hard the simplistic interpretations that both liberals
and conservatives offer about the serious social problems that confront America generally
and African American communities specifically. Too many liberals seek to blame all
problems on institutional hierarchies, policies, and practices; and too many conservatives
would have us believe that if individuals would simply work hard all their problems
would go away. These crude, one-dimensional approaches make good television talk show
debates but they do little to move this nation toward solutions. The truth is that
racism is still real, that it continues to limit what sociologist's call the "life
chances" of peoples of color, meaning the opportunities to get power, prestige, property,
and presumed worth. Ridley and other conservatives rarely account for (or count) institutional
racism, that is, the existence of systematic policies and practices within society's
institutions, that have the effect of disadvantaging certain racial or ethnic groups.
Yes, individual racism and institutional racism are real, but they do not account
for all the social problems that confront Americans of African descent. All the racism
in the world cannot keep you from reading a book as evidenced by the secret schools
that blacks used during slavery. Anti-intellectualism thrives in too many African
American communities. There are too many unwed mothers, many of whom are teenagers
-- in poor black communities where the crime rate is obscenely high. The African American
community, as a whole, faces significant social problems and many of those problems
are made worse by self-defeating and group-defeating behaviors.

But Ridley is wrong. There are no niggers. Zero. None, not a one. A young brother,
pants sagging, talking loud, flunking out of school is not a nigger; no, he is a young
brother, pants sagging, talking loud, and flunking out of school. And the best thing
that Americans -- all Americans -- can do for him is not to avoid him but to create
a society where he has every chance to succeed and nurture him to success. Taking
down Jim Crow signs does not mean that the dominant group kept its end of the Deal.
That is naive. And the best things that young brother can do are study, sit at the
feet of elders for wisdom, treat himself and others with respect, and work with vigilance
and diligence. He needs to believe -- and live in a society where there is reason
to believe -- that he is good, that his good dreams will not be deferred, seek his
contribution, and do this in a society where some people, blacks and whites, believe
that he is a nigger. He must ignore the rappers, movie makers, comedians, and book
writers who tell him he is a synonym for nigger. That young brother, heaven help him,
has got to do better and got to be the best he can.

Nigger is a social construct and an ugly one at that. It is a venomous insult. Ridley's
essay did not convince me that some blacks are niggers, only that he thinks so. Nor
did he educate me about the significant social problems faced by blacks. I grew up
near Highway 45 in Prichard, Alabama; I have seen the kind of poverty that would make
many Americans throw up. The only solution he offered is repugnant to me: "send niggers
on their way." I do agree with him that Rice and Powell are deserving role models,
but so are some of the poor folks near Highway 45. Of course, he is right to complain
about the tendency among some blacks to summarily dismiss African American conservatives
as "Toms," "Oreos," and "Aunt Jemimas." But how does calling name-callers niggers fix that? Much of the African American response to Ridley has been of the ad hominem
variety -- attacking him personally. (see, for example, Williams (2006)).I tried to
focus on his ideas. I will conclude with an excerpt from the essay that I co-authored
with Phillip Middleton, "Niggers and Caricatures."

"There is a direct and strong link between the word nigger and anti-black caricatures.
Although nigger has been used to refer to any person of known African ancestry, it
is usually directed against blacks who supposedly have certain negative characteristics.
The Coon caricature, for example, portrays black men as lazy, ignorant, and obsessively
self-indulgent; these are also traits historically represented by the word nigger.
The Brute caricature depicts black men as angry, physically strong, animalistic, and
prone to wanton violence. This depiction is also implied in the word nigger. The Tom
and Mammy caricatures are often portrayed as kind, loving "friends" of whites. They
are also presented as intellectually childlike, physically unattractive, and neglectful
of their biological families. These later traits have been associated with blacks,
generally, and are implied in the word nigger. The word nigger was a shorthand way
of saying that blacks possessed the moral, intellectual, social, and physical characteristics
of the Coon, Brute, Tom, Mammy, and other racial caricatures."

I use the word nigger in discussions about race relations and when I'm describing artifacts to guests visiting
the Jim Crow Museum, but I will never call a black man or woman a nigger, in anger
or jest, because that word embodies all the venom and opprobrium that this nation
has directed against Africans and their American descendants. I will not use this
slur to prove that I am assimilated, successful, or "ascended." Almost from the moment
in 1619 when John Rolfe purchased "twenty Negars" to work on his Virginia tobacco
farm, we, the darker Americans, have faced a society that believed that we were cultural
inferiors, good only for mocking and menial labor. Nigger has been a stigmatized label,
and a justification for treating dark people as inferiors. No, I will not call any
person a nigger and I will not treat any person as a nigger. And, while I am on this
thought train, let me say that I abhor the use of the word trash to refer to poor
white people. I guess Mr. Cleotis Williams was right when he said to me in 1973, "Little
David, don't stay poor; Americans don't like poor people."